Arizona State University Art Museum

About

The Arizona State University Art Museum is an art museum operated by Arizona State University, located on its main campus in Tempe, Arizona. The Art Museum has some 12,000 objects in its permanent collection and describes its primary focuses as contemporary art, including new media and "innovative methods of presentation"; crafts, with an emphasis on American ceramics; historic and contemporary prints; art from Arizona and the Southwestern United States, with an emphasis on Latino artists, and art of the Americas, with one historic American pieces and modernist and contemporary Latin American works. The art collection was established in 1950. The current director of the Art Museum is Miki Garcia. The director of the museum reports to the dean of the ASU Herberger Institute for Design and the Arts, and community members are represented through the museum's Creative Impact Board. The museum is located in two buildings. The main exhibition space is the Nelson Fine Arts Center, designed by architect Antoine Predock. A second museum facility, the Ceramics Research Center lies to the north, on 7th Street and Mill Ave in the Brickyard Engineering Building. Admission to the museum is free. Parking at the main museum is free if you use the reserved spaces directly in front of the museum. Parking at the Brickyard location is metered. In 1950, prominent Phoenix lawyer Oliver B. James gave a gift of 16 oil paintings by American artists to ASU. Over five years, James donated over 149 works by various American, Mexican, and European artists to the museum. The collection was originally included among the stacks at the university's first library building, the Matthews Library. The Neoclassical building was constructed in 1930 and was remodelled in 1951. The library was expanded in 1955, but in 1966, with the library space outgrowing the university's collection, Matthews Library was closed and 16 miles (26 km) of books were moved to the Charles Trumbull Hayden Library, which had been completed the previous year and remains the university's main library today. The art collection remained at the Matthews Library building, renamed Matthews Center. Contributions from donors expanded the museum's collections, particularly of prints and American crafts. Rudy Turk was the founding director and curator of the Arizona State University Art Museum, where he worked from 1967 until 1992. In 1977, the museum received a National Endowment for the Arts matching grant to purchase of contemporary American ceramics. By 1978, the museum occupied the entire second floor of the Matthews Center, with some 10,000 square feet (930 m2) of exhibition space. In April 1989, the ASU Art Museum moved into the newly completed Nelson Fine Arts Center, designed by architect Antoine Predock, where the museum remains today. The Nelson Center is 49,700 square feet (4,620 m2) and includes five galleries as well as administrative offices and storage and processing areas. Soon after the Art Museum's move to its new facility, the size of its staff doubled, and a curator of education, a print collection manager and several administrative and security workers were added to the staff. In 1992, Marilyn A. Zeitlin became the museum's director. Zeitlin was praised for expanding the museum's collections eightfold during her tenure. Under Zeitlin, the museum was chosen to curate video artist Bill Viola's show at the United States Pavilion at the Venice Biennale in 1995. However, the museum experienced controversy when The Arizona Republic revealed that a university audit in early 2007 showed that the museum had received $450,000 over seven years from prominent donor Stephane Janssen, one of the museum's largest donors, and arranged with him to buy art from Janssen's company. The arrangement was

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